William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[carl]

Wm:

What a remarkable piece you've written. It not only illustrates one of Lind's main points, it also manages to remind us why the Founders had such a distrust of a standing army.

Let us go through your post in detail.

The visceral reactions displayed on this thread and others on this board to critical comments by Lind, and to Carl, Fuchs, and JMA to name a few, exemplify the institution’s moral strength.

That is a remarkable statement. That some of the reactions to statements criticizing the US officer corps are visceral, in accordance with Lind's statement "They feed this swill to each other and expect it from everyone else. If they don’t get it, they become angry. Senior officers’ bubbles, created by vast, sycophantic staffs, rival Xerxes’s court. Woe betide the ignorant courtier who tells the god-king something he doesn’t want to hear."; exemplify moral strength. I think the visceral reactions are perfectly consistent with Lind's words.

Instantiating loyalty involves defending the institution to which one is loyal against criticism by outsiders. Thus, Lind, Carl, Fuchs, and JMA are responded to emotionally because they, as outsiders, do not have the right to criticize the institution to which American Pride, Bill Moore, The Curmudgeon, and I currently belong or have belonged in the past. JMA and Fuchs also do not have the right to criticize the US President or any other member of America's leadership because they are not Americans. This exercising of loyalty ought to be obvious to both JMA and Fuchs as they have expressed it themselves—Fuchs when JMA has castigated the Bundeswehr and the German people, to neither of which has JMA ever belonged; JMA when I, an American, criticized John Buchan, apparently one of his icons (and a former senior leader of a Commonwealth nation), or when I discounted his officer pre-selection process (excuse me, the British system which he espouses) without having been a selectee under that process.

Your first sentence is the classic argument of bad cops and bad police forces, or bad armies, "It's our business not yours. You are not one of us." There are several things wrong with that. I'll list them.

1. You work for me, the citizen/civilian, not the other way around. I, the citizen/civilian, pay you, equip you and feed you. In return, I (carl, this particular citizen/civilian) expect you to win and not get too many of my relatives killed and for you to tell the truth.

2. When you fail to do what I pay you to do, you will hear from me, and you will not whine about being criticized. I am the boss, not you.

3. Your loyalty is not to the officers corps. You are not a member of the El Salvadorian Army. If you want to be in an organization where officers owe their first loyalty to each other, leave. Your loyalty is to the Constitution, the country its citizenry.

4. If you can't handle that, leave. I, the citizen/civilian, will find somebody else to do the noble job of defending the country and the Constitution. I don't need whiners.

5. If you can't handle that and don't want to leave, we will have a major problem and you will lose, not me, the citizen/civilian.

6. One of the reasons the Founders distrusted standing armies I think is that such armies might tend to consider themselves better, apart from the citizenry and above the law, as exemplified by the suggestion (below) that carl does not have the privilege of criticizing the military because he never served.

7. I pay you to lead and think. Part of thinking is to look at things in other places, see what is good and adopt it. When people from other places make criticisms I don't want to you bow up and say how dare you?! I expect you to look and think about what they have to say. The Romans didn't refuse to adopt a short thrusting sword because it Spanish.

Current and past members of the U.S. Army have the privilege, perhaps even the duty, to critically evaluate their Army, within the context of their Army. From the perspective of loyalty, Carl and JMA, having never served in that Army, do not have that privilege. Similarly, I, having never served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, do not have the license to criticize JMA’s service therein, however much I might wish to do so; only he and his RLI mates have that privilege. To allow outsiders to make negative comments about the U.S. Army, and the United States in general, without response is to be disloyal to that institution and that nation.

See above. No don't see above. I'll say it again. I am an American citizen. The US military was created to serve my needs, not me its. I pay for it. Any officer who takes exception to that is reflecting an imperial attitude, one of Lind's points I think.

Soldiers have a right to complain (perhaps it is the only right they have). However they have limits on how they may express that right, limits set by the Army’s values and American public laws. Airing the U.S. military’s dirty laundry by running off to the press with stories about the problems in the U.S. Army is equally disloyal, at least until such time as no other recourse exists within the appropriate chain of command. One might view that now infamous Rolling Stone article involving GEN McChrystal in such a light. I do not know enough to say one way or another and reserve judgment.

Another example of the classic argument of the bad cop.

The very things that Lind finds indicative of moral rot are the things that seem to represent moral vigor. If Lind were to see the kind of critique he says is missing from the military, then he would indeed be witnessing the moral collapse he bemoans. He would be witnessing disloyalty. The fact that he doesn’t suggests that the U.S. Army still has a vigorous adherence to its values.

Moral vigor if moral vigor is corrupted to mean mindless parochialism. If it is not, you have an a very nice illustration of one of Lind's points.